Disaster Recovery – Don’t Cut Your Business Life Support

April 20th, 2018

Ability to recover data, the difference between life and death

Running your business without a disaster recovery plan is like driving with no seatbelt. You don’t plan on needing your seatbelt, but you wouldn’t cut it out of your car! It is much the same with disaster recovery and your business.

If a disaster does strike, you will wish you had a business continuity plan in place. The cost of the safety net is nothing compared to the cost of your business folding.

Don’t bury your head in the sand – Disasters DO happen!

As disasters are random in nature, they can lull you into a false sense of security. Don’t be tricked! Disasters can and DO happen. Generally, they involve the loss of business critical information in some way. Floods, storms, sabotage, terrorism, theft and equipment failure can all have this effect.

A fire in your building has the potential to wipe out all of your data if you don’t have any offsite backups. 90% of businesses that lose their data in a disaster are out of business within two years.

How much revenue would you lose if your business shut down for a few days?

Disasters aren’t just limited to the permanent loss of data. What would happen if your servers failed and you could not access any of your customer information or documents for two or three days?

Businesses rely on IT systems to function – if your IT systems go down, your employees cannot work, and you would miss out on potential revenue. It is estimated that UK businesses miss out on £2 billion of revenue per year due to IT system downtime.

Would your company’s reputation stand up during a system outage?

In 2011, a major airline had a problem with their IT systems that lasted almost a week – resulting in extremely disgruntled customers unable to book, change or cancel flights online, or in person at their kiosks. Only the call centre was able to process the requests, putting it under immense strain and further enraging the majority of customers who were unable to get through.

What would happen if an employee deliberately deleted your business’ files?

In 2010, an angry employee of a US-based pharmaceutical company caused $800,000 worth of damage by destroying important data – freezing the company’s activities for a number of days.

In 2007, an employee who believed she was about to be fired from an architectural firm, erased 7 years’ worth of drawings worth $2.5 million, in an attempt to sabotage the entire business.

Luckily the firm had a disaster recovery plan in place that meant they could recover the files.

It’s not worth putting your business on the line to save on disaster recovery

A good business owner is always finding ways to reduce costs. Unnecessary expenditure lowers your profits. You may be tempted to cut that disaster recovery plan that has never been used. Don’t do it!